Well what were you suggesting? That the WTC had huge magnets installed in the basement, to be turned on at the crucial moment and accelerate the top floors downwards? Or were you thinking of giant downward-facing rockets installed on the top floors? Even in one of those weird scenarios with the demolition charges, once they explode, gravity is what brings the top of a building pancaking down on the lower floors.

OK, the Sadly,Nocracy are Mean Kids, but your post does kind of call out for a impolite response.

Um, Allan, you who throws out allegations and innuendo without even the most basic facts, I never said I was at home when the plane hit. I was driving north on 395 from my home (then in the Fairlington area) into DC. Take a look at the map, I was just coming up to Fort Myer on my left and the Pentagon was almost dead ahead. http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=pentagon&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=32.527387,59.238281&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&z=15&ll=38.865108,-77.061067&spn=0.015605,0.028925. Right before there, you come up a hill, so I didn’t see the plane till I crested the hill. I didn’t take a picture bcs I didn’t have a camera and I was concentrating on not hyperventilating and going “Holy fucking shit” while trying not to crash my car on a major highway. Multitasking like we do here.

I’m nobody and have no credibility to lose.

No shit. What say we grow the fuck up. If you can’t conceive of how this happened unaided by the shadowy minions maybe it’s because your knowledge is lacking and you need to GET SOME MORE GOD DAMNED INFORMATION!!!

hur hur hur

Excuse me. I get sick of this magical-thinking let’s-wank-a-bit-and-pretend-it’s-real bullshit.

No problem, and I like it, but I took it from some other SN commenter who deserves the credit. Here it is. Thank you Woodrowfan.

Besides, I love the “morans” meme; it makes me happy happy happy.

In terms of high-rise fires, WTC was a complete anomaly. Fire shielding adds HOURS of protection against fires, plenty of time to allow firefighters to respond. No shielding, and you lose that response time. There’s never been a high-rise fire similar to WTC, and, insh’Allah, there won’t ever be again.

Allen you really ought to take a look at it as well.

http://www.debunking911.com/index.html

Sadly, No. Try: I’m ignorant and have no credibility to offer.

Steel has shit for heat resistance, as M. Sphinx has pointed out upthread. That’s why you see protective coatings applied during construction (they look like spray-on concrete cottage cheese). The theory for the WTC collapse is that the impact of the jet (one-half-em-vee-squared, baby) created enough force to knock off the coating from the steel beams, exposing them to burning kerosene and weakening them. Once the first floor fell through, it was all over.

NOVA had a story on this last year, and from where I sit — with my smarty-pants engineering degree — it was pretty compelling. Not nearly as interesting as remote control drones, Jew-free office zones, and carefully placed demolition charges, but interesting in a “oh, that’s how the physical world works” kind of way.

Morans.

the overall duration of time each of the towers took to fall was faster than (rather than slower than, in order to account for the time it took to gather up kinetically and transform the lower, untouched, undamaged floors’ — or their supportive structures’ — stored, mostly inert energy into free-falling weight) the speed they “should” have taken without extra assistance beyond what is accepted as the entire cause of all of the collapses: the plane strikes and subsequent burning off of the jet fuel.

I’m nobody and have no credibility to lose.

Myself, I blame the Cubans.